Project title: "The daily bread. A comparative study of the designation and use of food in Egyptian temples of the Greco-Roman period"
Project:
The interdisciplinary project AGROS (Agriculture, diet and nutrition in Greco-Roman Egypt. Reassessing ancient sustenance, food processing and [mal]nutrition) deals with food in Greco-Roman Egypt on the basis of the archaeological collection of plant and animal remains preserved at the Kelsey Museum of Archaeology (USA). The results obtained with the methods of archaeobotany, archaeozoology, nutritional biochemistry and microbiology are supplemented by information from papyrological evidence and hieroglyphic sources. Researchers from the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, the KU Leuven, the Université de Liège, the Kelsey Museum of Archaeology, the University of Michigan and the Université de Namur are involved in the project. The latter hosts the Egyptological part of the project, which is conducted under the direction of Prof. Dr. René Preys.
Within this framework, the postdoctoral research project with the working title The daily bread. A comparative study of the designation and use of food in Egyptian temples of the Greco-Roman period is pursued by Dr. Alexa Rickert (Université de Namur, associated with the Graduiertenkolleg 1876, Mainz). Since the Egyptological tradition assumes that the food offerings made to the deities in the temples were distributed to the clergy after the completion of the ritual, one of the questions of the project is to what extent these offerings are related to the diet of the priests. Examining the types of food present in the temple also raises the question of why certain dishes (e.g. fish or eggs) do not appear in the depictions and descriptions of the offerings.
In order to extract relevant information from the extensive textual material on food in the late temples of Egypt, the project relies on the case study of a corpus of text from the naoi of the temples of Edfu and Dendara, clearly defined by the architectural setting. This material will be used to investigate the vocabulary of food and whether there are differences between the two sites in terms of the selection and distribution of food designations within the individual rooms of the temple. In cooperation with colleagues from the KU Leuven, it will be examined to what extent the vocabulary for food in the temple texts corresponds with the papyrological sources. Possible discrepancies between the representations of food in the temple and the corresponding texts will also be investigated. Based on this, the project is also dedicated to the so-called circulation of offerings, which consists first of all in the forwarding of food from the main deity to the other deities of the temple and ultimately in the provisioning of the priests. Through the underlying questions, which concern the definition of food and food categories in Ancient Egypt as well as the relationship between humans and the environment that feeds them, the research project connects to the thematic core areas of the Graduiertenkolleg 1876 and sets new interdisciplinary highlights.